Steve Herbert

The Trapdoor of Community

Abstract The devolution of state authority is frequently cited as a central component of neoliberalism. Such devolution reduces the states obligations for the welfare of its subject populations. “Community” is often invoked as a potential recipient of heightened obligations, in part because of widespread and warm associations with the term. Although much academic work tracks the logic of neoliberal projects, little interrogates the assessment of devolution by the citizens upon whom it presses obligations. I undertake this task here, drawing upon extensive qualitative data gathered from a set of diverse and contiguous neighborhoods in Seattle as part of a project examining one such exercise in devolved authority, community policing. Interviews of residents in these neighborhoods demonstrate that community is not a sturdy support for neoliberalism but rather is best analogized as a trapdoor. Residents do not envision a robust political role for community and outline a range of obstacles to localized self-governance. Further, they question the extent of the states off-loading of responsibilities. The legitimacy of the state, the data suggest, risks rupture through the trapdoor of community.

Policing the Contemporary City: Fixing Broken Windows or Shoring Up Neo-Liberalism?

Two principal models exist for reforming contemporary police departments: community policing and broken windows (or order maintenance) policing. Although the two types of reforms share some commonalities, they differ markedly in the level of citizen oversight they envision. It is thereby significant that the two movements are frequently conflated. I offer here an explanation for why this conflation occurs, focusing on three critical areas: police culture and organization, public attitudes about crime and criminal justice, and the activities of political elites. In each of these three domains, broken windows policing meshes more comfortably with established patterns of thought. As a result, broken windows policing supplants community policing as the dominant reform movement, with considerable consequences for the operations and oversight of contemporary police departments.

Tangled up in blue Conflicting paths to police legitimacy

Police departments struggle to legitimate themselves to the publics they serve. This challenge is fundamentally related to different possible articulations of the relation between society and state. Three key articulations are critical to the relationship between the police and the citizenry, what I term subservience, separation and generativity. I explore each of these, and illustrate their presence in everyday police practice, drawing upon qualitative data gathered during observations of police patrol and police-community forums in Seattle. Because each of these modes of the state-society relation is significant, and because they lie in some tension with one another, the legitimacy of the police promises to be a site of ongoing political contestation.

Morality in law enforcement : Chasing bad guys with the Los Angeles Police Department

Police officers regularly construct their work in terms of a morality that is so pronounced that it must arise from unique aspects of their role in society. The author draws on fieldwork conducted in a patrol division of the Los Angeles Police Department to develop an explanation for the prevalence of police morality. Three components of the police function create potent dilemmas that their morality helps ameliorate : the contradiction between the polices ostensible aim to prevent crime and their inability to do so; the imperative that they run roughshod over the ambiguity inherent in most situations they handle; and the fact that they invariably act against at least one citizens interest, often with recourse to a coercive force that can maim or kill. Reliance on moralistic understandings for the polices mission provides a salve for these difficulties; however, it can also work to harm police-community relations. Paradoxically, the polices reliance on morality can encourage or condone overly aggressive actions that are, in fact, contradictory to the virtuous self-definition officers often construct

The end of the territorially-sovereign state? The case of crime control in the United States

Abstract Numerous commentators argue that the nation-state is an endangered species. External forces of globalization and internal forces of social differentiation, many suggest, are significantly weakening the states capacity to regulate its subject population within its jurisdictionally-defined space. Such an argument is often made in the specific case of crime control. The spread of international communications networks and the growth of international policing suggest that single-state crime control efforts will increasingly be insufficient, the growth of private security and community-oriented crime reduction efforts suggest that the state is surrendering crime control to other domestic agencies. This paper examines the specific case of crime control in the United States to argue that the putative weakening of the state is not in fact occurring. When examined more closely, suggested evidence of decreased state power vis-a-vis crime turns out, if anything, to demonstrate the opposite. The analysis demonstrates that, in the American case especially, the state remains startlingly relevant when it comes to efforts to combat crime and maintain order. Because police agencies are bureaucratic institutions that must demonstrate their relevance to ensure their continued health, and because the states broader legitimacy is linked to the provision of security, the public crime control apparatus promises to remain robust for the indefinite future.

‘This is home for us’: questioning banishment from the ground up

Banishment is an increasingly common tool for urban social control. In Seattle and other cities, new tools give the police stronger authority to create and enforce zones of exclusion. Deployed most commonly in neighborhoods populated by homeless people and members of other disadvantaged populations, banishment orders seek to coerce individuals to relocate. As an attempt to reduce crime and disorder, however, we suggest that banishment fails. We demonstrate this by drawing on interviews with forty-one Seattle residents who live with at least one exclusion order to ascertain how their strong connections to place make compliance with banishment an oppressive burden. Even if banishment increases the authority of the police, and thereby helps them to respond to public concern about ‘disorder’, it makes everyday life more perilous for the socially-marginalized. This suggests that banishments increased popularity deserves robust contestation.

Territoriality and the Police

Despite widespread interest in the relationship between the exercise of power and control of space, few current works in geography make explicit use of the concept of territoriality. This paper does so by considering the means by which the Los Angeles Police Department pursues its law enforcement and order maintenance functions through regulating space. I draw upon fieldwork observations of a single LAPD patrol division to demonstrate that officers regularly seek to govern the citizenry through controlling the spatial parameters of permissible action. The imperative toward effective territorial control is given further impetus within the subcultural world that officers construct; indeed, officers evaluate each others competence in large part on their ability to manage activity within the spaces for which they are responsible.

Introduction—the Policing of Immigration

The movement of people across national borders is understandably of longstanding significance to political geography (for notable recent accounts of the geopolitics of immigration, see Nevins, 2002; Mitchell, 2004; Mountz, 2004; Ellis, 2005; Hubbard, 2005). The social control of individuals within countries is also a focus of growing attention within the discipline. Policing, this literature makes plain, very much involves regulating behavior in and through space (Fyfe, 1991; Herbert, 1997; Yarwood, 2007). Modern nation-states, in other words, rest their strength and legitimacy fundamentally on their capacities to monitor and control the flow of people and resources into and through their bounded territories. One can learn much about the nature of state power by studying immigration and policing. Yet only occasionally are immigration and policing brought together in geographic analyses. This is somewhat surprising, given the increased attention to the relationship between law and geography (for overviews, see Blomley, 1994; Blomley et al., 2001). It is hard to imagine a more significant arena in which legal and geographic activity intersect. This is regrettable, not least because the movement of individuals and goods within and across boundaries will only increase as globalization intensifies. Moreover, a welldeveloped geographic sensitivity is essential for capturing the logics and consequences of the mechanisms used to regulate global flows. The articles in this special issue represent a strong effort to fill this void. Although they vary in their empirical targets, each seeks to understand what it means—politically, geographically—to attempt to control the flow of migrants. Although each focuses on the United States, the political dynamics they unearth occur in many other locales. The lessons they offer can therefore inform analyses of similar dynamics in a variety of places. Mat Coleman mines the fields of political rhetoric to better understand the role of the “undocumented immigrant” in U.S. politics. As he demonstrates, this political trope is remarkably flexible and versatile; it is a concept around which condenses a broad range of domestic and foreign policy issues. In the service of politicians, the undocumented migrant emerges as a multi-faceted threat: to cultural unity by resisting assimilation; to the public treasury by absorbing welfare services; to collective health by introducing loathsome diseases; to public safety by selling drugs and waging terror. Coleman’s genealogical account thereby helps us appreciate the impressive political mileage the immigration issue can provide for those willing to invoke and provoke jingoistic attitudes. He

Contemporary geographies of exclusion III: To assist or punish?

Processes of inclusion and exclusion raise profound questions. As scholars of exclusion, we need to determine where to train our focus; as citizens, we need to determine whether and how exclusion is deleterious. When exclusion is pursued as a form of punishment, it is most readily open to question. This review of recent literature makes clear that scholarship on exclusion is robust, multifaceted, and necessary.

Contemporary geographies of exclusion II: lessons from Iowa

Processes of exclusion both presuppose and reinforce boundaries. Yet the realities of globalization mean that such political and cultural boundaries are regularly and increasingly transgressed. Cross-border traffic is simultaneously encouraged and feared; migrants who are welcomed because of their labor are often shunned because of their difference. Because of the tensions generated by the inevitable co-mingling in everyday space between insiders and outsiders, the politics of immigration regulation are unusually fraught in the contemporary period. For this reason, the line between foreign relations and domestic politics is increasingly blurred. As states become more robust in their boundary enforcement practices, the political plight of migrants becomes more perilous. The recent literature on exclusion understandably emphasizes the politics and practices of immigration policing, with broader lessons that I use this review to elucidate.